“Dolph said one vamp was covered with blankets, and rushed to the hospital. Is that why you think the others may not be in their coffins?”
He blinked. “There’s also a vampire on the stairs leading down. It’s…” His gaze fell, then came up suddenly to grab mine, angry. “I’ve seen burn victims but nothing quite like this.”
“Are you sure it’s a vampire?”
“Yes, why?”
“Because vamps exposed to sunlight or fire usually burn completely down to ash and a few bone fragments.”
“We doused it with water,” Wren said. “Thought it was a person at first.”
“What changed your mind?”
It was his turn to look away. “It moved. It was like third-degree burns down to cartilage and muscle, bone, and it held out its hand to us.” His face looked pale, haunted. “No person could have done that. We kept coating it with water, thinking maybe we could save it, but it stopped moving.”
“So you assumed it was dead?” I asked.
All three of them exchanged glances. Captain Fulton said, “You mean it might not be dead?”
I shrugged. “Never underestimate a vamp’s ability to survive, Captain.”
“We’ve got to go back in there and get it to a hospital,” Wren said. He turned as if he’d walk back into the house. Fulton caught his arm.
“Can you tell if the vampire is alive or dead?” Fulton asked.
“I think so.”
“You think?”
“I’ve never heard of a vamp surviving fire. So yeah, I think I can tell if it’s alive. If I said otherwise, I’d be lying. I try not to do that when it’s important.”
He nodded twice, briskly, as if he’d made up his mind about me. “The arsonist threw accelerant all over the floor that we’re going to be walking on top of, and once we’re down in the basement that same floor will be above us.”
“So?”
“That floor is not going to hold, Ms. Blake. I’m going to make this a strictly voluntary job for my people.”
I looked up into his serious face. “How likely is the floor to fall and how soon?”
“No way of knowing. Frankly, I’m surprised it hasn’t caved in by now.”
“It’s a halfway house for the Church of Eternal Life. If it’s like the last basement I saw at a Lifer’s place, the ceiling is concrete reinforced with steel beams.”
“That would explain why it hasn’t fallen in,” Fulton said.
“So we’re safe, right?” I asked.
Fulton looked at me and shook his head. “The heat could have weakened the concrete, or even weakened the tensile strength of the steel beams.”
“So it could still fall down,” I said.
He nodded. “With us in it.”
Great. “Let’s do it.”
Fulton grabbed my arm and gripped it too tight. I stared at him, but he didn’t flinch and he didn’t let me go. “Do you understand that we could be buried alive down there or crushed to death, or even drowned if there’s enough water?”
“Let go of me, Captain Fulton.” My voice was quiet, steady, not angry. Point for me.
Fulton released me and stepped back. His eyes looked a little wild. He was spooked. “I just want you to understand what could happen.”
“She understands,” Dolph said.
I had an idea. “Captain Fulton, how do you feel about sending your people in to a potential deathtrap to save a bunch of vampires?”
Something passed through his dark eyes. “The law says they’re people. You don’t leave people hurt or trapped.”
“But,” I prompted.
“But my men are worth more to me than a bunch of corpses.”
“Not long ago I’d have brought the marshmallows and wieners for the roast,” I said.
“What changed your mind?” Fulton asked.
“Kept meeting too many human beings that were as monstrous as the monsters. Maybe not as scary, but just as evil.”
“Police work will ruin your view of your fellow man,” Detective Tammy said. She and Larry had joined us at last. It had taken Larry a long time to cross those yards. He was far too hurt to insist on going inside the house. Good.
“I’ll go in because it’s my job, but I don’t have to like it,” Fulton said.
“Fine, but if we do have a cave-in, we better get dug out before nightfall, because without the vamp chaperone we’ll be facing a basement full of new vamps that may not have perfect control over their hunger.”
His eyes widened, showing too much white. I would have bet money that Fulton had had a close encounter of the fanged kind once upon a time. There were no scars on his neck, but that didn’t prove anything. Vamps didn’t always go for the neck, no matter what the movies say. Blood flows near the surface in lots of places.
I touched his arm lightly. Tension sang down his muscles like a string pulled too tight. “Who’d you lose?”
“What?” He seemed to be having trouble focusing on me.
“Who did the vampires take away from you?”
He stared at me, dark eyes focusing on me. Whatever horrible image was floating behind his eyes retreated. His face was almost normal when he said, “Wife, daughter.”
I waited for him to say more, but the silence gathered round us in a still, deep pool made up of all the horror in those two whispered words. Wife, daughter. Both lost. No—taken.
“And now you have to go into the dark and save some bloodsuckers and risk yourself and your people. That really sucks.”
He took a deep breath through his nose and let it out slowly. I watched him gain control of himself, watched him build his defenses back piece by piece. “I wanted to let it burn when I found out what was inside.”
“But you didn’t,” I said. “You did your job.”
“But the job’s not done,” he said softly.
“Life’s a bitch,” I said.
“And then you die,” Larry finished for me.
I turned and frowned at him, but it was hard to argue. Today, he was right.
42
THE TWO-BITER, AS Dolph so poetically put it, was a small woman in her thirties. Her brown hair was back in a tight ponytail leaving her neck and the vampire bites painfully visible. Vampire freaks, people who just liked vamps for sexual turn-ons, hid their fang marks unless at one of their hangouts. Human members of the Church of Eternal Life almost always made sure the bites were visible. Hair worn just right, short sleeves if the marks were at wrist or elbow bend. They were proud of the bites, saw them as signs of salvation.
The upper set of fang marks were larger, the skin redder and more torn. Someone hadn’t been neat with their food. The second mark was almost dainty, surgically neat. The two-biter’s name was Caroline, and she stood hugging herself as if she were cold. Since you could probably fry eggs on the sidewalk, I didn’t think she was cold, or at least not that kind of cold.
“You wanted to see me, Caroline?”
She nodded, head bobbing up and down like one of those dogs you used to see in the backs of cars. “Yes,” she said, voice breathy. She stared at Dolph and McKinnon, then back at me. The look was enough. She wanted privacy.
“I’m going to take Caroline for a little walk. If that’s okay?”
Dolph nodded. McKinnon said, “The Red Cross have coffee and soft drinks.” He pointed to a small truck with a camper shell. Red Cross volunteers giving coffee and comfort to the cops and firemen. You didn’t see them at every crime scene, but they hit their share.
Dolph caught my gaze and gave a very small nod. He was trusting me to question her without him, trusting me to bring him back any info that pertained to the crime. The fact that he still trusted me that much made the day a little brighter. Nice that something did.
It was also nice to be doing something useful. Dolph had been hot to get me to the scene. Now everything was stalled. Fulton just wasn’t eager to risk his people for corpses. But that wasn’t it. If there’d been six humans down there, we’d have already been suited up a
nd going in. But they weren’t human, and no matter what the law said, it made a difference. Dolph was right, before Addison v. Clark, they’d have gotten a fire crew in here to make sure it didn’t spread to the other houses, but they’d have let it burn. Standard operating procedure.
But that was four years ago, and the world had changed. Or so we told ourselves. If the vamps weren’t in coffins and the roof collapsed, they would be exposed to sunlight, and that would be it. The firemen had used an axe on the wall next to the stairs so I could see the second vamp corpse. It was crispy-crittered but not dust. I had no explanation for why the body had remained so intact. I wasn’t even a hundred percent sure that come nightfall it wouldn’t heal. It—even I still did it. But the body was so badly burned, like black sticks and brown leather, the muscles in the face had pulled away leaving the teeth, complete with fangs, in a grimace that looked like pain. Firemen Wren had explained to me that the muscles contract with the heat enough to break bones sometimes. Just when you think you know every awful thing about death, you find out you’re wrong.
I had to think of the body as an “it” or I couldn’t look at it. Caroline had known the vampire. I think she was having a lot more trouble thinking of the body as an it.
She got a soft drink from the nice Red Cross lady. Even I got a Coke, which meant it was pretty damn hot for me to pass on the coffee.
I led her to the front yard of a neighboring house where no one had come out to check the scene. The drapes were all closed, driveway empty. Everyone gone for the day. The only sign of life was a triangular rose bed and a black swallowtail butterfly floating over it. Peaceful. For a moment I wondered if the butterfly was one of Warrick’s pets, but there was no feel of power. It was just a butterfly floating like a tiny tissue-paper kite over the yard. I sat down on the grass. Caroline joined me, smoothing her pale blue shorts down in back as if she was more accustomed to wearing skirts. She took a drink of soda. Now that she had me to herself, she didn’t seem to know how to start.
It might have worked better if I’d waited for her to begin, but my patience had been used up long ago. It wasn’t one of my cardinal virtues to begin with. “What did you want to tell me?” I asked.
She sat her can of soda carefully on the grass, thin hands smoothing along the hem of her shorts. She had pale pink nail polish on her short nails that matched the pink stripes in her tank top. Better than pale blue, I guess.
“Can I trust you?” she asked in a voice as fragile and pale as she seemed.
I hate being asked questions like that. I wasn’t in the mood to lie. “Maybe. It depends on what you want to trust me with.”
Caroline looked a little startled, as if she’d expected me to just say, sure. “That was very honest of you. Most people lie without thinking about it.” Something in the way she said it made me think that Caroline had been lied to often, by people she’d trusted.
“I try not to lie, Caroline, but if you have information that’ll help us here, you need to tell me.” I took a drink of my own soda and tried to appear casual, forced my body not to tense up, not to show how much I wanted to simply scream at her until she told me whatever it was. Short of torture, you can’t make people talk, not really. Caroline wanted to tell me her secrets. I just had to be calm and let her do it. If I was overeager or abusive, she’d either fold and tell all, or clam up and let us rot. You never knew which way it would go, so you try patience first. You can always browbeat them later.
“I’ve been the human liaison for this halfway house for three months now. The guardian who oversaw the younger ones was Giles. He was strong and powerful, but he was trapped in his coffin until true darkness. Then two nights ago he woke in the middle of the day. The first time for him. The one on the stairs has to be one of the younger vampires.”
She looked at me, brown eyes wide. She leaned into me, lowering her soft voice even further. I had to lean into her just to catch her voice, close enough that my hair brushed her shoulder.
“None of the younger ones has been dead two years. Do you understand what that means?”
“It means that they shouldn’t have risen during daylight hours. It means that the one on the stairs should have been burnt to ashes.”
“Exactly,” she said. She sounded relieved to finally find someone who understood.
“Was this early waking restricted to your halfway house?”
She shook her head, whispering now. We had our heads together like first-graders talking in class. I was close enough to see the fine red lines in her eyes. Caroline had been losing sleep over something. “Every house and all the churches were suddenly having vampires rise early. The hunger seemed worse on the young ones.” Her hand went to her neck and the messy wound. “They were harder to control, even by the guardians.”
“Anyone have any theories as to why this was happening?” I asked.
“Malcolm thought someone was interfering with them.”
I had several candidates for who might be interfering with the vamps, but we weren’t here to get my answers. We were here to get Caroline’s answers. “He have any ideas about who?”
“You know about our illustrious visitors?” she asked, voice even lower, as if she were afraid to say the last.
“If you mean the Vampire Council, I’ve met them.”
She jerked back from me then, shocked. “Met them,” she said. “But Malcolm has not met them yet.”
I shrugged. “They paid their…respects to the Master of the City first.”
“Malcolm said they would contact us when they were ready. He saw their coming as a sign that the rest of vampirekind was ready to embrace the true faith.”
I wasn’t about to sit there and tell her why the council had really come to town. If the Church didn’t know, they didn’t need to know. “I don’t think the council thinks much about religion, Caroline.”
“Why else would they come?”
I shrugged. “The council has its reasons.” See, not a lie, cryptic as hell, but not a lie.
She seemed to accept the statement. Maybe she was used to cryptic bullshit. “Why would the council want to hurt us?”
“Maybe they don’t see it as hurting.”
“If the firemen go down in there to save the young ones and they wake without a guardian…” She drew her knees to her chest, hugging her legs. “They’ll rise like revenants, mindless beasts, until they’ve fed. People could be dead before they come to themselves.”
I touched her shoulder. “You’re scared of them, aren’t you?” I’d never met a human church member who was scared of vampires, especially not one that was donating blood as a human liaison.
She lowered the neckline of her tank top until I could see the tops of her small breasts. There was a bite mark on the pale flesh of one breast that looked more like a dog bite than one made by a vampire. The flesh had bruised badly, as if the vamp had been pulled off her almost as soon as he’d started sucking.
“Giles had to pull him off of me. He had to restrain him. Looking into his face, I knew that if Giles hadn’t been there, he’d have killed me. Not to bring me over or embrace me, but just because I was food.” She let her top slide back over the wound, hugging herself tight, shivering in the hot July sunshine.
“How long have you been with the Church, Caroline?”
“Two years.”
“And this is the first time you’ve been scared?”
She nodded.
“They’ve been very careful around you, then.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
I unbent my left arm, showing the scars. “The mound of scar tissue at the crook is where a vamp gnawed on me. He broke the arm. I was lucky not to lose the use of it.”
“What about that?” She touched the claw marks that trailed down the lower part of the arm.
“Shapeshifted witch.”
“How did the cross get burned into your arm?”
“Humans with a few bites like you thought it was amusing to brand me wit
h the cross. Just amusing themselves until their master rose for the night.”
Her eyes were wide. “But the vampires in the Church aren’t like that. We aren’t like that.”
“All vamps are like that, Caroline. Some of them control it better than others, but they still have to feed off humans. You can’t really respect something that you see as food.”
“But you are with the Master of the City. Do you believe that of him?”
I thought about that and answered truthfully. “Sometimes.”
She shook her head. “I thought I knew what I wanted. What I was going to do for all eternity. Now I don’t know anything. I feel so…lost.” Tears trailed out of her wide eyes.
I put my arm across her shoulders, and she leaned into me, clinging to me with her small, carefully painted hands. She cried soundlessly, only the shakiness of her breathing betraying her.
I held her and let her cry. If I took the nice firemen down into the darkness and six newly dead vampires rose as revenants, either the firemen were dead or I’d be forced to kill the vampires. Either way, not a win-win situation.
We needed to find out if the vamps were alive, needed some control over them. If the council was causing the problems, maybe they could help fix it. When big bad vampires come to town to kill me, I don’t generally turn to them for help. But we were trying to save vampire lives here, not just human. Maybe they’d help. Maybe they wouldn’t, but it couldn’t hurt to ask. All right, it could hurt to ask, and probably would.
43
EVEN OVER THE phone, I could tell Jean-Claude was shocked at my idea of turning to the council for help. Call it a guess. He was literally speechless. It was nearly a first.
“Why not ask for their help?”
“They are the council, ma petite,” he said, voice almost breathy with emotion.
“Exactly,” I said. “They are the leaders of your people. Leadership doesn’t just mean privileges. It has a price tag.”
“Tell that to your politicians in Washington in their three-thousand-dollar suits,” he said.
“I didn’t say that we did any better. That’s beside the point. They’ve helped make this problem. They can, by God, help fix it.” I had a bad thought. “Unless they’re doing it on purpose,” I said.
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